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PRACTICAL TRAVELER

PRACTICAL TRAVELER; Euro Airport as Regional Hub

By ROGER COLLIS

Published: January 10, 1999

SWISSAIR has introduced nonstop service from Newark to Basel, Switzerland, welcome news to travelers who can now make fast connections through a small, user-friendly airport to provincial cities like Bilbao, Nuremberg, Dresden, Toulouse, Nice, Marseilles, Valencia, Friedrichshafen and Rostock.

There are also flights to major cities such as London and Berlin, but often to business airports like London City and Tempelhof, a short cab ride to the city center. In addition, there are connections to megahubs like Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle in Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt -- if that's where you need to go.

The six-times-weekly service, which began Dec. 17, is by Swissair Airbus 310 (42 business-class and 143 economy seats) as a code-share with Delta Airlines and Crossair -- Swissair's regional subsidiary -- which is developing an extensive hub-and-spoke network through Basel.

Newark-Basel is the first of a dozen similar ''long, thin'' services (that is, with sparse traffic) that will be operated in Crossair colors on routes such as Basel-Buenos Aires/Atlanta/ Mexico City/Charlotte, N.C. -- what I call regional long-haul routes. Cross air ultimately plans to acquire a long-haul fleet of upgraded Boeing 767's to serve these routes.

Book a flight to Basel or Mulhouse, France, and you'll arrive at the same airport -- Euro Airport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg -- right at the border separating Switzerland, France and Germany in the Upper Rhine Valley.

Four million people live within 60 minutes of the airport, which is 6.3 miles (10 kilometers) from Basel; 16 miles (26 kilometers) from Mulhouse and 46 miles (75 kilometers) from Freiburg in the southwestern corner of Germany. Zurich will be 45 minutes away when a new highway is completed.

Euro Airport, 50 years old but in the process of expansion, will have served nearly three million passengers in 1998 (around 40 percent each from France and Switzerland and 20 percent from Germany) with 12 airlines currently offering more than 45 scheduled flights to 92 destinations in 25 countries. Such carriers as Air France, British Airways, Sabena, KLM and Lufthansa serve 36 cities in 20 countries from Euro Airport.

Bypassing the Megahubs

Crossair plans to develop Euro Airport as a regional hub for people who wish to travel between, say, Nuremberg and Bilbao, or Dresden and Toulouse, thus saving time and avoiding the misery of changing planes at a megahub like Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Paris or Zurich, which give priority to long-haul connections.

Crossair's ''Euro Cross'' is a new strategy that provides more than 520 connections a day between 40 cities through Euro Airport with an expected connecting time of 20 minutes. The carrier aims to have 1,000 daily connections linking 48 European destinations by next year, including regional services from Euro Airport to such destinations as Warsaw, Budapest, Athens, Ankara, Bologna, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Oporto, Trieste and Moscow, as well as long-haul routes to North America and Asia.

Euro Cross flights arrive and depart in four coordinated waves: early in the morning, midday, afternoon and evening, enabling people traveling to and from most destinations in Europe to get there and back the same day. For example, Toulouse-Vienna via Euro Cross is 2 hours 15 minutes faster than via Zurich; Amsterdam-Bilbao is 2 hours faster than via Paris; and Friedrichshafen-Birmingham is 1 hour 30 minutes faster than connecting in Frankfurt.

''If someone could fly point-to-point from Frankfurt to Palma at a suitable time, he would never go via Euro Cross, or if someone in Nuremberg could save time by flying to Bordeaux via Frankfurt, he would not use Euro Cross,'' says Moritz Suter, president and chief executive of Crossair. ''But people will take Euro Cross because it is faster and easier in many cases.''

Convenience at a Price

Crossair flies to 82 European destinations (plus around 25 routes on behalf of Swissair) with a fleet of 80 aircraft consisting of 33-seat Saab 340 turboprops, 50-seat Saab 2000 turboprops and 97-seat Avro RJ jets. The company carried 4.7 million passengers in 1997 -- 19 percent more than the previous year -- and made a net profit of about $28 million.

Small planes operating frequent flights on lightly traveled routes and relatively high fares are the key ingredients to Crossair's success. Round-trip fares from Euro Airport to London City, a 15-minute cab ride from the City, or Heathrow are $1,085 in business class, $845 in economy and $185 discounted fare.

Crossair is what you might call a ''high frills'' carrier. Riding the 33-seat Saab 340 Cityliner, for example, is the next best thing to a private plane. On short flights you're served regional specialties with wines to match, or open sandwiches of smoked salmon and cheese with Champagne from a real bottle.

The triangle where the frontiers of Switzerland, France and Germany intersect on the Rhine is the crossroads of ancient north-south and east-west trading routes, in use long before the nations were created. Alsace changed hands many times between France and Germany over the years -- belonging to Germany from 1871 to 1918 and again from 1940 to 1944.